If you don’t know about the whole Cathie Black controversy in NYC, look some of it up here. In response to it, I think this is funny as hell. Maybe Sarah Palin can beg for a waiver to be President in 2012. She’d need one, although I hope to God she doesn’t get it.

I hope everyone’s break was restful. I’m coming off a read-eye out of Phoenix, so I can’t believe I’m able at this point to form a coherent thought. Let me be brief then. Is Black the new Palin, or is Palin the new Black? Interesting question. Consider all of those here for your reading enjoyment.

For many Democrats and Republicans (at least the ones that Diane Ravitch likes to remember), the intrusion of the federal government into state and local education issues has been an acceptable burden to bear, since it was only the Federal government that could guarantee the enforcement of civil rights laws. In fact, ESEA was enacted […]

From Gothamist: . . . .Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and other city pols say they will file a temporary restraining order to block her [Black’s] appointment, which Jeffries said state Education Commissioner David Steiner didn’t want to approve anyway. “Commissioner Steiner appears to have made this decision in the back room with Mayor Bloomberg whispering in […]

There is reason for Deborah Kenny to be smiling. As CEO of Harlem Village Academies charter school in charge of 450 students in total, she raked in $442,000 this past year. Connection to Cathie Black? Nothing having to do with education, it seems, even though Black touts her connection to Harlem Village as the source […]

For some it has been a mystery why someone with Oprah’s public image would be up to her neck in corporate education reform built on planned segregation and exploitation of the poor and the brown. Yet her recent 60-minute infomercial with Gates and Guggenheim to pump Waiting for Superman is indicative of her aggressive parroting […]

John Walton: DFER catalyst? So says Whitney Tilson in an interview from his documentary, A Right Denied. Here is a snippet: [DFER was started] …with a few other friends that are involved with a couple other other charter schools, and they were money managers like me involved with a couple similarly high-performing charter schools, we finally […]

Recently, the state of Indiana released a list of schools that failed to make AYP. I’m not going to discuss the (de)merits of AYP; instead, I’m going to point out something that, as the title of this post suggests, has me a bit perplexed. Two of the four Imagine-run schools in the state made the failing APY […]

(Click to enlarge. Photo: Patino for News) With the Daley/Duncan reforms in Chicago so poisonous that Ron Huberman is in flight even as “Ren2010″ has been eliminated from the City bureaucracy’s vocab, and with Michelle Rhee repudiated and dismissed in DC, and with the empirical evidence piling up that nearly all of the federal (Gates/Broad) […]

The new Gates Foundation financials are out, and things look much improved in 2009 following the 2008 meltdown. When you click on this chart to enlarge it, you will see that the Gates Foundation now has nearly 30,000 millions of dollars (that’s 30 billion) to use as it sees fit to bribe, to silence, to […]